rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about why not to add nitrous oxide boost
systems to your car, now some racing guys to cheat especially on street races will
add nitrous oxide to their car, canister gas that injects the stuff into the engine to
give it insane boost, now nitrous oxide does work there's no arguing that
improves performance not just by the gas that comes in and makes things burn
faster, but it also makes a lot of cooling inside the intake and when it's
cooler and more dense, you're gonna get more power so it really does work quite
well, but the main problem is, the system itself is going to be pretty bulky
because your engine uses a lot of air and the containers that hold the nitrous
oxide have to be heavy because it's compressed gas, they take up a reasonable
amount of space and there's only so much nitrous oxide you can pack into one of
those tanks, to give you an idea, a 5 liter engine going at 4,000 rpms uses
10,000 liters of air every minute, so with nitrous oxide you're gonna need a
gigantic tank or even if you got one that's like a scuba tank size, you're
only going to get a few minutes of nitrous oxide before the tank runs out
now there's two type of nitrous oxide systems there's dry and there's wet, now
if you use this dry system and fuel-injected car everything has to be
programmed correctly, it's not something that you just bolt on and drive away
so it's a real deal setting it up right in the first place, now in the wet
nitrous system it uses both the nitrous oxide and the gasoline it mixes them
both when it goes into the engine, now the wet system is what they originally
used when I was young because most things were carbureted and it's set up
better for a carbureted system, because the carburetor is on the top of the
intake and it sends the fuel evenly to all the cylinders, so if you're adding
nitrous air it's going to be pretty much evenly distributed, cuz of the fuel and
the air isn't evenly distributed you're gonna get back fires and poor running
using something that creates that much compression it can destroy an engine
I've seen them put holes and pistons, and regardless of your using wet or dry
nitrous, realize that there are four different systems for
delivering it on different types of cars, when I was young and guys are doing my
carbureted vehicles, they use a single nozzle system, just had a single nozzle
and it would just inject it right into the intake we a lot of boost that way
and more modern cars you can use a direct port system, say you've got one fuel
injector on each port, you use the same type of nozzle as in the other system
but you have one for each cylinder and this system is used mainly in racing
applications, they'll actually put numerous different nozzles in different
places and have an all computer-controlled so that you can have
boost at a certain point closer to the engine boost a little bit further away
all depending on what RPMs are running the engine at, now the third
type of system is called the plate system, they have a plate it's like a
spacer plate and it's put on the intake in various different positions and the
last type of system is called the bar system and that's just a hollow tube
that has holes drilled on it and that's hidden inside the intake plenum to shoot
nitrous in, but regardless of the different types of nitrous oxide systems
that are out there, it's not a good idea to put it on your car that you're
driving on the street, now in many states it's illegal, I remember once I was
riding with a kid who had one on his Mustang and a cop pulled him over he saw
that he had a nitrous system on, kid knew the law and the law was if the tank
wasn't connected to the system, you can drive it on the street that way and say
hey I only use this when I'm racing at the racetrack, so he didn't get a ticket
for the nitrous oxide, but he did get a ticket for speeding
he couldn't talk his way out of that, but technically least here in the United
States, nitrous oxide is illegal completely because it makes the cars pollute
more, when you're using these nitrous systems, one of the things that catalytic
converter does is get rid of oxides of nitrogen when you're shooting nitrous
oxide into a car they pollute a lot more than the legal
limit, of course nobody's dumb enough to be turning their nitrous oxide on while
they're doing an emissions test to get the car inspected, but technically
they're totally illegal because they pollute more, now you're not gonna using
them all the time so the pollution aspect isn't that much because even the
big tanks only last for a few minutes but, using nitrous oxide has a big
downside and that is, you're getting so much higher compression and more power
out of the engine, I've see numerous engines blown when people
turn on the nitrous oxide, they'll knock a hole in the piston, they'll blow the head
gasket, all kinds of damage can be done, everyone seen some of those videos at the
drag strip or so when a guy takes off and then the head of the engine just
blows right off and flames go shooting up in the air, well it's not a good idea
for your car to take that kind of abuse, especially with modern fuel-injected
engines, since everything's run by computer if you actually do set up a
nitrous oxide system in a modern fuel-injected car, it's gonna cost you a
to run correctly, take when I was a young mechanic with a carburetor, ha they just
put a spacer plate under the carburetor and then it would just spray it down in
there and they'd add it on turn it off and it would take off like mad, it isn't
as complex as a fuel-injected cars, where everything is directly metered by a
computer and back in those days especially in the 60s, you take all those
big v8 engines they're cast-iron engines, cast-iron can take a lot more pressure
than cast aluminum, the aluminum can bend a lot easier than cast-iron will, you
start adding nitrous gas inside one of these systems, you can blow an aluminum
head aluminum block engine quite easily if you put a little bit too much boost in
it, if you've ever driven a turbocharged car, you know you got gauges for the boost
and they have what's called a wastegate, if the pressure gets too high then the
wastegate opens, so it can't boost it too much, with these nitrous oxide systems
you open that thing up and it starts boosting, if it's not metered correctly
it can easily boost too much and blam goes the engine, now I've known a lot of
guys that put nitrous oxide systems on motorcycle, it's kind of a toy thing for
them motorcycles are super fast anyway and if one guys raced another guy maybe
there's some money involved and he's got some nitrous oxide hidden under the seat
somewhere, he might win that race and pocket some money, but for cars that
you're driving around or you want to go a little bit faster you take a pretty
big chance putting nitrous oxide on any modern car that you're driving on the
street, there's always gonna be guys out there putting nitrous oxide systems
on to show how fast they can go, but for the average person who wants their vehicle
to last as long as they can, stay away from nitrous oxide and
definitely don't use it like some of those party boys do, so if you never want
to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!